A quick post about mobile web statistics. I’ve been keeping an eye on mobile web use for many months now, in order to inform mobile strategy more widely. Been an interesting 15 months. Here’s the picture (quite literally!) right now:
Android continues its strong growth, mainly eating into the iPod and iPhone share. Symbian continues to decline, Blackberry grows slowly and Windows – well, I’m only bothering to track those devices which actually matter. Windows figures are far too low to even think about right now. As for the iPad, after inital strong sales it looks very much like it’s plateauing, suggesting that those who are going to buy have done so. Note that analytics data is not clever enough as yet to look at the tablet market more widely, but that is changing.
One more caveat – mobile visits still only accounting for about 2% of total visits, so whilst a growing area this is still a tiny proportion of overall web traffic.
Extremely interesting stats there Rich,
I don’t think iPad sales are plateauing. The iPad 1 has sold 17 million units, the iPad 2 has sold nearly 4 million units selling twice as fast as the iPad 1, industry analysts have raised their iPad sales expectations to 45 million sales next year.
With the expected release of the iPhone 5 in September this year, I think you will see stats for iPad and iPhone increase, with the iPod declining. Android has enjoyed stellar growth with the mobile industry looking like a two horse race between iOS based devices and Android based devices.
Adding iPad, iPod and iPhones together, which all run the same OS and browser shows Apple command over 75% of the mobile market as of March, I think this might increase at the expense of Blackberry (RIM) and Symbian.
Interesting Times.
iPad sales might not be plateauing Darren, but market share seems to be. Not the same thing perhaps, but more important from our point of view.
The point of the graph is that for all Apple’s noise and marketing, Android keeps gaining more ground. Remember that in this time frame Apple released first the iPhone 4, then the iPad, then the iPad 2, yet Android has maintained its constant growth eating into the Apple share all the time – with almost negligible publicity compared to that which Apple has enjoyed. They’re well aware of this I reckon, hence the speeding up of their release cycles.
I’d be very interested to see these figures over the coming months. Would it be possible to make a permanent link to a dynamic chart (using the excellent Google Charts API of course) on the blog so that we can get a realtime display of the state of the mobile market?